Author: The inner gardener

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What mushrooms might reveal about the nature of God

Some chanterelles we hunted down last year

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Keith Giles called The Quantum Sayings of Jesus. It’s a commentary on the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, about half of which feature in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. He goes to great lengths to justify their authenticity and then reads them through a lens of our connectedness with the divine, noting that our real problem isn’t our separation from God so much as our failure to realise that we are already one with God and with each other.

Although his interpretations ask a lot of the reader, they fit well with the teachings of Richard Rohr and others on the limitations and dangers of dualistic thinking and our need to wake up to our profound union, in Christ, with everyone and everything else. One of my problems with this kind of thinking is that it is difficult to conceptualise. The image that comes to my mind is that of a mycelial network.

I have always been fascinated by mushrooms, by their strange shapes and smells, by the way they can feed you, heal you, or poison you – and you better be sure you can identify them! Looking for mushrooms feels more like hunting than foraging, you might have an idea of where they are likely to be, but, unlike the bramble you can reliably return to year on year, you cannot count on locating them. There are so many factors at play and a big dose of the mysterious (or since I hunt in the autumn, perhaps it’s a dose of the mist-erious?)

The mushrooms themselves are just a tiny part of the whole organism, they are the fruiting bodies that pop up above the surface at an opportune moment, while underneath the ground there is a huge fungal network connecting plants and trees through their roots, continuously exchanging resources and information.

I like to imagine that God might inhabit his creation rather like a mycelial network, with living beings emerging from God to flourish upon the Earth for a time and then returning into Him, like mushrooms sprouting up from the mycelium for a few days and then decomposing back into the earth. I tried to express something of this connection in my post on 1 Corinthians 2:9-16.

Acts 17:28 In him we live and move and have our being
John 14:20 On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

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Spiritual accompaniment

Who’s doing the accompanying?

In the past, spiritual accompaniment, or spiritual direction as it is also known, has largely been the preserve of ‘professional’ religious people, but it has been growing in popularity among the rest of us in recent years.

After four years of training and with experience of accompanying people on retreats and over longer periods in daily life, I have come to see spiritual accompaniment as offering hospitality by providing a safe, non-judgemental space where we can listen together to where God is at work in a person’s life.

I think I’m drawn to this work partly thanks to my personality – I have never felt like I had the answers to anyone’s problems or had anything particularly useful to say, which, funnily enough, has made me into a good listener! As far back as university, I remember asking my friends how they were ‘within themselves’ and even now, it seems like the most helpful thing I can do is ask a few questions and then see what surfaces.

To find out more, click here.

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Slugs, scissors and the denial of death

This lucky one escaped the slugs.

I shocked and horrified a colleague the other day by explaining that my approach to dealing with the overwhelming slug population in my garden was to snip them in half with scissors. Apparently, she will never look at me in the same way again. I admit that it does sound pretty horrible, perhaps she imagined me hounding the poor defenceless creatures and bloodthirstily relishing the moment of their demise? Let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

As I tried to explain to my colleague, by then in a state of shock and not very receptive to reason, it’s surely more humane to kill them quickly than to drag out their demise using salt, poison or beer? What’s more, I leave their uncontaminated remains to be consumed by other members of the ecosystem (which are probably other slugs, given the fact that the remaining individuals are getting progressively bigger). And I do feel bad about it, it gets harder the bigger the slugs get, and it’s especially difficult when they raise up the front part of their body in an attempt to ‘look human’ and shame me into sparing them. At least I do generally apologise to them first (unless I am too angry about the damage they’ve just done), but when push comes to shove, it’s between them and my vegetables (and they’ve already had more than their fair share).

My daughter, a slug-sympathiser who NEVER lies to me, wound me up terribly the other day by pointing out that slugs had an emotional capacity similar to that of dolphins. After a few seconds of stunned silence, I came to my senses, and continued snipping.

I know there are other methods, I tried out elaborate plastic cones this year that claimed to prevent the entry of molluscs, but my slugs clearly hadn’t read the instructions. Other people collect their slugs and snails and deposit them miles away, to prevent them from returning – but is that kind? Deporting them to unknown territory where they will probably get picked off anyway? Plus, I’m not willing to spend my limited energy on that kind of shenanigans. You might ask where the hedgehogs are in all of this? Well, I saw a couple of them under the hedge earlier in the year, but now they’re nowhere to be seen, and I can’t exactly import new ones.

Why is slicing slugs so problematic? I think it comes down to a denial of death. Killing slugs in this very direct way makes me face the unpleasant fact that I am taking their life away, but it’s their life or the life of my vegetables, and by extension my life. Beyond my hobby gardening, many other organisms have to die for me to live –even if these are usually ‘only’ plants. You can argue that not all forms of life are equal, but the taking of one life to sustain another is just a fact of existence. Or maybe we can look at it the other way around, that life is given, relished and then offered up to another form of life. When my time comes, I look forward to feeding the mushrooms.

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Sister Water

This is a reflection written for the start of Creationtide with the theme of water, based on the following passages: Job 37:1-13, Revelation 22:1-7 and John 19:31-37.

I love the book of Job, or at least parts of it. Interspersed between long speeches about Job’s suffering, and the possible reasons for it, are radiantly beautiful passages about the glory of God as revealed in the natural world. The passage I chose for our reading today is a beautiful reminder of the majesty of God’s gift of water in the form of snow, rain, ice, and moisture.

It was in the water that God ignited the first spark of life at least 3.5 billion years ago, bringing single-celled microbes into being near hydrothermal vents. By about 1.2 billion years later, a bacterium had emerged that could convert sunlight into chemical energy, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere as a by-product, and preparing the way for complex life to thrive in the millennia to come.

We humans, along with fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and other mammals, have retained something of that primordial ocean within bodies, in the form of the fluid that surrounds our cells. Nearly two-thirds of our bodies are composed of water, and we are entirely dependent on it for our survival. Our blood, sweat and salt tears are another reminder of our origins in the primordial seas.

Human life still begins in salt water: the foetus grows and plays in the amniotic fluid of its mother’s womb, and we speak of waters breaking when the time comes to deliver.

Water is a remarkable molecule, quite unlike any other. It is made up of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, which gives it a particular shape and electronic configuration that lead to specific properties. It is these properties that make water a blessing that sustains life like no other molecule could.

Its chemistry means that lakes don’t freeze completely solid in winter, nutrients are transported to the top of trees against the force of gravity, sweat cools us down, and the temperature of ponds stays relatively constant from day to night.

Water cycles continuously throughout the planet; liquid water evaporates into water vapor, condenses to form clouds, and precipitates back to earth in the form of rain and snow. This dynamic flow is essential for the wellbeing of every living thing on the planet.

But our relationship with water is distorted. We have forgotten our oceanic origins and severed our connection with the water that birthed us. We treat water as a commodity, something to be used and abused to the point that rivers are being polluted by industrial farms and contaminated once again with untreated sewage. What is happening with water on a planetary scale exemplifies our alienation from the rest of the non-human world. The increasingly erratic weather patterns we are experiencing in this ecological crisis often feature water: too much when there is flooding and too little in times of drought, and the weakening gulf stream that warms western Europe is carried in the Atlantic ocean.

The consequences of our alienation from the rest of creation are increasingly dire for people in particularly climate-sensitive countries. Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia, for example, have been badly affected by drought this year, with 68 million people needing urgent food aid.

For the sake of our brothers and sisters in these countries, and for many other good reasons, we urgently need to establish a healthy relationship with the non-human world, including the holy gift of Sister water, recognising, as St Francis did, our deep connection with her. In his Canticle to the Sun, he wrote “Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Water, which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.”

The imagery of water flows through the Bible, sometimes as a symbol of judgement, as in the story of the flood or of the drought announced by Elijah, and sometimes as a symbol of grace, like the dew on Gideon’s fleece or when Jesus offered the water of life to the woman at the well.

We meet it again in our second reading from the book of Revelation. This apocalyptic text is full of strange images, and we aren’t meant to take them literally, but they are useful because pictures and images help us to make sense of our world.

This reading comes just after a description of the New Jerusalem, the perfect city in which God makes his home with mortals, where there will be no more death, mourning, crying or pain. It is a vision of future wholeness where the union between humans and God is so complete that there will be no need for the light of a lamp or of the sun. In this hopeful image of a restored creation, we read of a pristine, unpolluted river flowing straight from the throne of God and of the Lamb. This river bears the water of life, which sustains the tree of life. This tree produces a different fruit each month and its leaves are for the healing of the nations: this living water brings fruitfulness to the earth and peace to humanity.

Here, Sister Water is freed from her bondage to the consequences of our sin, free to fully be the gift from God that she is. In the new Jerusalem we also will be the people that God intended us to be. This is an image of shalom – of wholeness, health, peace, safety, fullness, rest and harmony. This shalom is a restored relationship between us and the rest of creation, and between us and God. The world desperately needs to experience this; our times are marked by people alienated from each other, from God and from the rest of creation, with increasingly catastrophic consequences.

So how do we get from the reality of where we are today, with our polluted rivers, floods, and droughts, to experiencing life in shalom, sustained by the metaphorical river of life that flows from God’s throne?

There is one last water image in our third reading that bridges this gap. In John’s account of the crucifixion, we read that soldiers pierced Jesus’s side to make sure that he was dead. Water then flowed from this wound – it is a rather gory image, but it can be understood as a symbol of Christ releasing his divine life into the world.

Think of it like this: when a seed falls to the ground and is buried, in time it breaks open to release the new life of a seedling. Jesus on the cross is like a seed that is buried, dies and then releases his life into the world through the holy spirit. This divine life heals the ruptures within humanity, between humanity and creation, and between humanity and God.

This healing of ruptures, this all-encompassing shalom, is something we hope for in the fullness of time, but it also something we are called to live out in the present. This includes being at peace with water and with the rest of creation; but we can’t manage this in our own strength, as if the future of the planet rests entirely on our shoulders. Christ is the one who has broken the power of death and decay – he is the source of the water of life – and it is through him that shalom is coming. And yet, at the same time, we are his body now, and in the unfathomable mystery of God’s wisdom, he doesn’t do much, if anything, without our cooperation, and so we need to be radically open to whatever part he is calling us to play.

Returning to where we began, in the water, I encourage us to develop a deeper respect for Sister water, to conserve her rather than waste her. But there is more to this than switching the tap off when we brush our teeth; we need to look a little deeper and to use our imaginations. You’re probably quite familiar with the concept of the carbon footprint, but there is also our water footprint to consider. Everything we buy, use and throw away takes water to process and transport, we can use less water by making thoughtful purchases and reusing and recycling more. The same goes for food and, in this case, we can save water by eating lower on the food chain – so more plants and less meat and dairy products – by eating more whole foods and, very importantly, by not wasting food.

This is a call to live wisely, which brings me back to the image of the tree of life flourishing on the banks of the river in the New Jerusalem. It reminds me of Psalm 1, where we learn that a wise person who seeks God is like a tree planted by a river, whose leaves do not wither when the dry times come. By sinking our roots deep down into God, we can find our way to wisdom. There we can drink from the living water, which will make us fruitful and grow us into peacemakers, shalom-builders, in this world that is crying out for wholeness, peace and restoration.

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Back to school prayers

Freshly harvested coriander seeds.

These prayers were inspired by the reading for last Sunday’s service: Ephesians 6:10-20

Heavenly father, at this time of new beginnings we ask for your grace, strength and wisdom as we prepare for the next academic year.

In Ephesians 6, Paul encourages us to put on the whole armour of God, and so we fasten the belt of truth around our waists – help us to embrace all that is good and beautiful and true. May those who are studying enjoy their learning, and may all of us keep our minds open and willing to learn until the end of our days. Give grace and patience to those who teach and care for us, and help us to guide each other into truth.
Lord in your mercy: hear our prayer.

Next we put on the breastplate of righteousness. Help us take every opportunity to be kind to others, to include the person who seems to be left out, in the playground, at church, or wherever we find ourselves. Give us the courage to do what is right, even when it might be unpopular or cost us something, remembering your great love for every single person that we meet.
Lord in your mercy: hear our prayer.

And then we put on shoes that make us ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. May we be peacemakers where there is conflict, teach us ways to disagree well, and help us to remember that you ask us not only to love our friends but also our enemies.
Lord in your mercy: hear our prayer.

Next we take hold of the shield of faith, to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one, so that when things are difficult, we remember that you love us, that we matter to you, and that however hard things get, nothing can separate us from your love. Thank you for the people you have made us, with our skills and gifts as well as our weaknesses and foibles; help us to put all of who we are at your service and to resist the voices that seek to undermine us.
Lord in your mercy: hear our prayer.

We now put on the helmet of salvation, surrounding our minds with the assurance that we are safe with you, that we are united with Christ in God. Help us to remember that, whether our studies, work, or other activities are going well or badly, you love us just the same. Thank you that our place in your heart is assured no matter what is going on in our lives.
Lord in your mercy: hear our prayer.

And finally we grasp the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, not to attack other people but to help us learn the best way to live and to make wise decisions. As we enter this new academic year, teach us your ways and may we grow ever closer to you.
Merciful father: accept these prayers for the sake of your son, our saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

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Elderberries, hens and societal collapse

Straining the juice

Beautiful patterns in the nascent jelly

We went foraging a lot when I was a child, for blackberries, elderberries, and even firewood on a couple of occasions; the fun continued when we got home, with hot cauldrons of boiling jam and jars of jewel-like sweetness. To this day I have a very soft spot for certain preserves, elderberry and apple jelly being one of them – it has a very particular taste that doesn’t suit everyone’s palate, but it reminds me of those happy days foraging.

Not long after we moved in to our current home, I planted an elder tree in the garden, and for the last couple of years it has had enough fruit on it to make jelly, so yesterday I harvested the berries. I looked up a recipe online and stumbled across a blog post entitled Taking Care of the Elders, which brought me up short. The author of this blog encourages her readers to forage responsibly, only taking a maximum of 10% of the berries from each tree, leaving the rest for the wildlife and giving the tree a good chance of reproducing itself. I, however, practically stripped my tree bare.

In my defence, this is a tree that I had planted, not a wild specimen, and I couldn’t risk letting the juicy dark red clusters fall onto my neighbour’s pristine astroturf – but that isn’t the point. Despite having read Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants less than a year ago and totally taking on board the author’s mantra of reciprocity, respect, and restraint, I didn’t remotely reflect on that as I greedily, but at least gratefully, took all the ripe berries I could reach.

I’m clearly not the only person with this problem, as in many parts of Switzerland there are strict rules, for example about mushrooms: when you are allowed to pick them, and how many, in order to protect them for the future, which is important as mushroom picking grows in popularity. This tendency to take too much is part of a much bigger problem, as described in the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive; why societies fall apart is obviously a complex question with many factors involved, but one analogy that stuck with me from this book was how often we choose to eat the ‘hen’ rather than sustainably eating her ‘eggs’.

Perhaps I can at least partly blame the culture I find myself in, with its very short-term perspective, fear of scarcity and the need to hoard to get through the winter? It pains me to say how very challenged I am by the Indian proverb “Store your grain in your neighbour’s belly”, as I am far more likely to fill up my freezer than to be generous towards others with any abundance from my garden.

I can’t promise to limit myself to only 10% of next year’s potential elderberry harvest, but I will at least remember this reflection and leave some for the birds.

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Does the fruit of the tree of life have grubs in it?

This year, my fig tree is producing lots of fruit. Unfortunately for me, the birds in my garden also have a taste for figs and so I have taken to picking the fruit before it is fully ripe, since the birds swiftly demolish any that I miss. Even then, about half the figs I harvest contain a grub or two who have eaten their way through a good part of the flesh.

And so, as I was reading the words of my daily prayer for Sunday morning: Come and shelter under the tree of life, enjoy the cool shade and taste its fruit my mind went straight to my fig tree. In my imagination, I picked a ripe fruit and settled myself down on a shady chair – but I stopped myself short, did I dare take a big bite? What if it were full of grubs? Could the fruit of the tree of life have grubs in? Surely not, since heaven, where the tree of life is found, is perfect! Surely there is no place in paradise for grubs, slugs, nettles and everything else that causes me trouble?!

Of course, this is a philosophical question, it being highly unlikely that the afterlife will resemble life on Earth, and perhaps I shouldn’t make so much of symbols anyway, particularly apocalyptic ones? But it did strike me that perhaps at least some of the fruit of the tree of life would contain grubs. The insects they will grow into have a role to play in the ecosystem, just like the birds who enjoy their figs as much as I do.

It’s interesting to notice that I can come to terms with sharing the fruit of the tree of life with the grubs and the birds, while sharing the figs from my own tree is much more problematic. I think that, since I planted and tended the tree, I see them as my figs, that I have an exclusive right to them.

It looks like the problem here might be my selfishness and anthropocentrism! Maybe heaven, the kingdom of God, is where I can share my figs with the birds and the insects without begrudging them their share, after all:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.

Isaiah 11:6

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A form of daily prayer

My first-ever baby cucumber!

I have been meaning to put together a simple form of morning and evening prayer for a while now, and have finally managed to get it finished. I have unashamedly chosen my favourite passages and modified them to fit the pattern of the liturgy. I hope you find them helpful.

I have mainly focused on passages that explore the glory of God as seen in creation, to help encourage a sense of awe, but have also chosen passages that point us to ultimate hope.

Since there are fourteen separate sets of prayers, I have put them as individual tabs on a separate page. You can access them here, or even download them as a PDF for printing, (print them as a ‘booklet’.)

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1 Corinthians 2:9-16

My daughter finds deep symbolism in the stressed-looking mother opossum carrying her babies around, and felt the need to express this in clay 😉

I was pondering 1 Corinthians 2:9-16 on a train journey a few weeks ago – it’s rather dense text, and so my imagination took a bit of a leap. I’d like to share with you where I ended up. Once again, I wish I were an artist, because these verses conjure up a beautiful image that I struggle to describe in words.

Verse 10 talks about the Spirit who searches everything, even the depths of God, and so we start with the Holy Spirit reaching into the heart of God the Father.
Then in verse 11, we read that the human spirit, deep within us, knows what is truly human – our spirit reaches deep into our hearts.
Verse 12 tells us that we have received the Spirit that is from God, this makes a connection between our heart and the heart of God. The Holy Spirit joins with the spirit of our inner being, bringing us and God into union.

I imagine the Holy Spirit as a sort of dynamic loop of light flowing from the heart of God into our hearts, bringing love and peace. Once inside, the Spirit searches out our inmost being (Psalm 139:1-6), and then flows out of our bodies, bringing all we are living with into the heart of God the Father, where Christ is. This is an unbroken flow of the Spirit between our heart and the heart of God.

This action of the Holy Spirit changes our hearts and changes our minds, to the point that Paul dares to write in verse 16 that ‘we have the mind of Christ’. I am comforted by this intimate image of the love of God the Father being brought into my heart by the Holy Spirit, and that the troubles of my heart are then carried up to Christ in God, who understands me and transforms me.

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It’s high time I wrote something about compost.

My compost heap has gradually been working on me. I no longer pull out the pervasive weeds that invade my vegetable beds in frustration, rather these days I do it with gratitude, as they will soon be transformed into food for my plants in the warm, dark womb of the heap.

This morning I decided that it was time to cut down the stinging nettles standing guard around it. Since the neighbours have kindly consented to donating their kitchen scraps to my garden project, I thought I ought to at least make the area reasonably accessible. As I was stuffing the felled nettles into the top of the heap, I noticed a seedling that had grown at the bottom – probably a courgette or a pumpkin – and it made me smile.

Compost can also be a metaphor for life. Everything that happens to us, good or bad, can be put on the inner compost heap, broken down over time with reflection and prayer, and then be transformed into something new and life-giving. We have to trust this slow but steady process, perhaps that’s what the words I was reading in the letter of James this morning were talking about?